


To Love and Be Loved

by coconutcluster



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, Roman Sanders (mentioned) - Freeform, Thomas Sanders (mentioned, Virgil Sanders (mentioned) - Freeform, a teensy weensy bit of angst, fluffffffffff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 09:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17281190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coconutcluster/pseuds/coconutcluster
Summary: Logan, with his myriad of skills and interests and areas of expertise, knew he had weaknesses.He could never quite wrap his head around baking, despite its base in chemistry. Artistic pursuits tended to confuse and frustrate him. He still held on to a small teddy bear from Thomas’ youth, despite its lack of function or meaning in his job, simply because whenever he went to toss it out, his hand refused to uncurl from around the fuzzy toy and he was always left to trudge back to his room, unsuccessful but oddly relieved.And, above all, he didn’t understand love.





	To Love and Be Loved

Logan, with his myriad of skills and interests and areas of expertise, knew he had weaknesses.

He could never quite wrap his head around baking, despite its base in chemistry. Artistic pursuits tended to confuse and frustrate him. He still held on to a small teddy bear from Thomas’ youth, despite its lack of function or meaning in his job, simply because whenever he went to toss it out, his hand refused to uncurl from around the fuzzy toy and he was always left to trudge back to his room, unsuccessful but oddly relieved. 

And, above all, he didn’t understand love. 

His claim as the unemotional, rational one of the group was only half right. Rational? Yes. Unemotional? Hardly. He wasn’t blind to his outbursts, nor to the bouts of guilt and regret that always followed; he had long since given up on ignoring the tightness in his chest after he missed a deadline, just as he allowed the airiness of euphoria to exist when it happened to dance into his head, bright and bubbly and soaring; he knew inferiority and pride, in their own rights. He wasn’t ignorant to feelings. Just highly unfond of them. 

Love, however, was a different story. He was very well aware of Roman’s overdramatic confessions of adoration to everything from his sword to whatever meal Patton prepared while the prince was hungry, and he saw how Virgil and Roman interacted between banters, all crooked smiles and fond gazes, and of  _ course  _ he knew what it was like to regard his family closely, as Patton so often expressed to them. But it was the in-between that he didn’t get; what was past familial affection? Why were warm gazes and gentle touches and quiet conversations so common, so  _ important _ , in love? How did one even know when they felt it all? There were too many variables, and Logan just didn’t know where to start - but it continued to grind away at his curiosity until he couldn’t stand it any longer. So he researched it. 

The closest thing he could find to what he wanted was the Grecian idea of 7 types of love. Logan scoured their definitions from reference after reference, committing them to memory - Eros, Philia, Storge, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia, Agape - but in the end, they were just words. Just definitions on his vocab cards, lost to his heart as letters scrawled on cardstock and tucked primly into his pocket. 

He threw the cards away, eventually. He rid himself of a failed learning opportunity and pushed it to the back of his mind. It’s not as if the meanings of those words could ever truly leave, unless he focused hard on shoving them from his memory - and, for some reason, he was reluctant to do so, just like the little teddy bear sitting neatly on his dresser: at the last moment, he could never quite let go.

Maybe - maybe - it was because he had an inkling that he knew some of them already. He couldn’t pinpoint it exactly; they were all too alien to him, in all honesty, but trickles of recognition, blurry memories and twinges in his chest, plagued him whenever his thoughts flickered back to the definitions, and god, he didn’t want to lose those trickles.

 

The first time a trickle grows stronger is the most surprising, though if he’d have thought ahead about the possibility, he would have expected that; he sits in the living room with a cup of tea and an empty notebook, staring idly out the window to distract himself from the listlessness of a taskless Sunday evening, when the couch shifts beside him. He looks over to see Patton cross-legged on the next cushion, a smile on his face. 

“Good evening, Patton,” Logan greets, turning back to his notebook, pen in his hand as if he’s actually doing something. He can hope. 

“Evenin’, Lo,” Patton says in a singsong voice and a bit of a giggle, as if it’s funny to hear himself say. “Whatcha doing?”

“...I’m not sure.” 

Patton’s eyebrows quirk up. “Oh?”

“Thomas doesn’t have any upcoming deadlines as of yet,” Logan explains slowly, “and there’s no emergencies in the Mindscape, so I’m rather… dysfunctional right now.”

Patton squints at him, nose scrunching up with his small smile. “You’re not dysfunctional, Lo. You’re bored.” Logan just blinks. “Here, c’mere,” Patton tugs at his elbow and pulls him off the couch, into the kitchen, and puts his hands on his hips decidedly. “Let’s bake something.”

“I can’t bake.”

“Sure you can! Anyone can bake!”

“I can’t. I’ve tried many times, Patton, I assure you, but the results are always unsatisfactory.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t bake, silly, it just means ya messed up a little.” Before Logan can even retort - because, no, he can’t bake  _ because  _ he always messes up - Patton gestures brightly around the kitchen, his eyes bright. “Besides, baking is about the experience! It doesn’t really matter if what you make turns out bad; you made it, and that’s enough.” Logan frowns, but when Patton starts telling him to grab various ingredients, he follows directions. 

It’s just as they put the dough in the oven - cookies, Logan eventually deduces, is their end goal - that the trickle in his memory grows stronger, into a little stream, when he blurts, “Careful, Patton.”

Patton pauses his sliding the tray of cookies into the oven to look up at him with round eyes. “What?”

“Don’t burn yourself,” Logan says, after a beat of silence. It’s a simple warning, really, something he’d be sure to remind himself or any of the others should they find themselves in the same situation, but something about the phrase pricks at his mind. 

“Oh,” Patton says simply. His mouth curls into a smile. “Oh! Thank you, Lo. I won’t.” And they carry on as usual.

It’s not until they sit at the table later, icing the cookies with far too much buttercream to be any sort of healthy, that a word pushes its way to the forefront of Logan’s thoughts:  _ philia _ . Wanting for one what another thinks of as good. 

It’s friendship, Logan knows that. It’s a rather fundamental type of affection; common, in most cases. But the trickle in his head is stronger and coursing through his body, right to his heart, and the knowledge of what it feels like - concern, protection, relief - is a epiphany to him. 

And, for the first time since looking the terms up all that time ago, he lets the word rest snugly at the front of his mind. 

 

The second and third time he feels shifts in those little streams are on a rainy day. 

Logan has never minded rain. It’s good for the various life around them, and it’s rather entrancing to watch, anyway, so though Roman bemoans the weather and a very exasperated Virgil is left to distract him, lest the house be filled with the prince’s bored antics, Logan sits on the porch and watches the rainfall. 

There’s a gentle chill to the air that day. It brushes against his arms a few times, as if in greeting - Logan wishes, for a few fleeting seconds, that he could greet it back, and he’s immediately glad he’s alone as he gives a small wave to the rain, as if it can recognize the gesture. (There’s something engrained about the motion, though, something familiar, so Logan lets it be. Just this once.) His glasses are pushed up on his head, no doubt making his hair a mess, but the way the rain hits the ground as dimly lit blurs lulls him to a calmness he can never remember once it’s gone.

The door creaks open behind him, and he hears soft footsteps tap closer. 

“Lo?” Patton shuffles up beside him on the steps, gently shaking two mugs when Logan glances up at him, eyebrows raised. “I brought hot chocolate- I didn’t want you getting a cold out here, with the chill and all.” Logan takes one of the cups and, in lieu of a spoken thanks, nods his head to the empty space beside him on the porch steps; Patton’s eyes light up as he takes the seat. 

They sit in silence for a moment - though silence is a depraving term, disregarding the rain’s lullaby against the roof and pavement - before Patton waves. 

Logan pauses mid-sip and stares at him. “Why did you do that?”

“What?”

“Wave. You waved at the rain.”

“Oh,” Patton smiles, cheeks rosy and freckles dark in the grey light of the sky. “Habit, I guess.” He ducks his head a bit. “It’s so pretty and nice, I just… don’t want the rain to feel ignored? It’s dumb, I know-”

“I do it, too.” Patton blinks at him, his mouth twitching into a tiny, crooked grin. “I did it, I mean.” Logan takes a breath, as if it’s some confession that’s left his mind and body drained of energy, and the rain fills his sense, crisp and sweet and soft in his head, and the tension in his shoulders is gone once more.

“I think Thomas used to do it,” Patton says softly. His voice is quiet, wispy with reminiscence, and Logan wonders suddenly if memories return to him like feelings - what a nostalgic existence that must be. (Logan feels a pang of jealousy strike his heart.) “He’d sit out there, on the sidewalk,” Patton points, though this clearly isn’t the same sidewalk, “and look up at the sky and smile at it, like it could see him. He’d wave.” The fatherly side’s face softens with a small, wan smile. “I think Roman made him do it, honestly, but we all followed pretty quickly.”

_ We.  _ So Logan did it, too. He looks back out toward the street and lets the rain blur before him once more, leaning back onto his palms. He knows something is blaring in his head, a lightbulb of sorts, but he pays no mind to it for a few soft, quiet minutes that are filled with Patton’s gentle sighs and the rhythmic song of raindrops around them. 

_ Storge _ .

Logan nearly falls back onto the porch as the word hits him full-force, a trickle turned tsunami, and he realises what exactly the lightbulb was - instinctual, familial bonding between people, growing stronger with time. Storge. He knew another one! Logan almost wishes he hadn’t thrown the cards out that while ago, just so he could hang this one up, frame it above his desk and trace the letters over and over again. 

And the feeling… it’s subtle as it resonates in Logan’s chest, but it’s sharp, like pins and needles, and he understands the sadness in Patton’s eyes. Part of him wants to jump back in time and experience the moment with Patton, pr Roman or Virgil or just Thomas himself; he wants to see the rain falling into their eyes, wants to see their smiles as they wave up at the sky, to feel that stupid giddiness of doing something so genuine with his family.  

He’s standing before he can think about it, tugging at Patton’s wrist without explanation and pulling them under the embrace of the rain - Patton cocks his head to the side, but follows without complaining - and sits down on the curb. They sit in silence for a few beats before Logan takes his glasses off the top of his head, looks up, and waves. 

Patton’s surprised giggle sounds beside him. Logan glances over with a smile to see the moral side’s eyes closed and crinkled at the edges, nose scrunched up as he laughs into his hand. Logan elbows his free arm gently, glancing up at the sky when Patton looks to him, cheeks rosy, and Patton’s smile brightens as they wave at the clouds together. His round glasses are covered in droplets, though he doesn’t seem to care. 

And sitting there with the moral Side makes something else in Logan’s chest twinge. Patton’s golden curls are weighed down with rain, falling messily into his face, and his cheeks are flushed from laughter, light against the smattering of freckles across his nose and cheekbones. The way his shoulders still shake with giggles makes Logan want to grab his hands and pull him into a dance through the rainfall. He’s glad, with stark realization, that his own glasses rest on the sidewalk by his hand - he’s not sure what he’d do if he could see Patton with full clarity. 

He’s pulled back into reality when Patton bumps shoulders with him, mouth pulled into a crooked grin. “Just like old times,” the fatherly side giggles, giving Logan a wink. 

He knows there’s a word for this feeling - the seizing of his breath, the heat creeping onto his face, the urge to stare at Patton and memorize every detail on that freckled face, to laugh and talk and dance with him until the end of time, foolish as it sounds - and he senses it on the tip of his tongue, feels another trickle growing stronger, but he can’t find it in himself to focus on it right now. 

He wants to be in the moment, with Patton and the rain and the twinge of memories brought back for a few musical moments. 

 

(Later, when he gets back to his room soaking wet and light with joy, he sits at his desk and prints all seven words neatly onto new notecards with different colored pens - a gift from Roman that went unused until now - setting them prim on his dresser, just so he can find them easy the next morning to tuck them into his pocket.)

(The word for his odd, fluttering joy, he discovers while writing, is ludus. The phrase “young love” makes his face go red all over again, but he finds it’s not exactly unpleasant.)

 

The fourth time he feels a trickle grow stronger, it bleeds seamlessly into the fifth, and he wouldn’t want it any other way. 

The videos tend to take a toll on Logan’s energy. They’re filled with ideas hitting him from all angles, and he’s left to pick through them as quickly as he can in order to put his own forward, and with his status as the only objective one of the group, it can be exhausting to force his points into the conversation; when it gets bad, he lashes out, leaving his insides feeling hollow as he goes over every other way of dealing with his impulse. 

It’s not really a fun time. 

This video is no different, save for the fact that Logan reigns in the anger that wells up inside him when Roman speaks over the others to get to Thomas before anyone else, bouncing in his spot as his gestures sweep through the air in boisterous arcs. It’s a moment where Logan is more than happy that the prince and Virgil have grown closer - it takes the anxious side one snarky comment for Roman to glance over with round eyes and pull back a bit, just enough for Patton and Logan to give their opinions on the matter at hand. Thomas - thank the stars - actually listens to them, taking pieces of both the logical and moral sides’ input and stringing them together to form a satisfactory resolution. Logan’s tired to the bone, but he helped solve a problem without throwing a crumpled-up index card or yelling at a certain prince, so he calls it a success.

After they sink out, back into the Mindscape, Logan trudges up the stairs and collapses onto his bed in a pile of groans, thankfully muffled by his bedsheets. He can’t help but feel that hollowness resonate in his chest despite the relatively calm meeting. He feels guilty for letting himself be proud for not lashing out at his family, for being a decent person, as if it’s an accomplishment everyone else struggles with. 

A knock on his door pulls his attention away from the pit in his stomach. “Come in,” he groans into his bed before flipping over to stare at his ceiling, closing his eyes as the door creaks open.

“Lo,” Patton’s voice calls into the room, laced with amusement, “you okay?”

Logan gives a heaving sigh in response. 

The door clicks shut as Patton shuffles to the bedside, perching on the edge with his fingers laced together in his lap as he watches the logical side frown at the ceiling. “You seemed a little tense in the video,” he says gently. 

Logan sits up to blink at him, eyebrows furrowed. “I didn’t upset you, did I?”

Patton’s eyebrows shoot up. “No! No, you did really good- I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.” 

“Oh.” _ Is everything okay? _ Logan thinks to himself, chewing absentmindedly on the inside of his cheek. “I’m trying not to get angry at the others,” he admits slowly. It’s clearly not the answer Patton was expecting, but he says nothing, just waits for Logan to continue. “At Roman, really, but I don’t want to yell at any of you, and I... I don’t think that’s something I should have to do, but I do, and it- I don’t know what to do, Patton, but my insides feel heavy, which is illogical, since I haven’t consumed anything that would alter their weight-”

“Oh, Lo,” Patton murmurs, face pinched with concern. “You don’t have to feel guilty about trying to be better.”

“But what if I’m  _ can’t  _ be better?”

The room falls silent as Logan snaps his mouth shut. His fingers curl into claws in his bedsheets, and he stares pointedly at his shoes as Patton watches him with a knit brow; he hadn’t meant to ask, to reveal the turmoil under the surface issue- what if would would always be the volatile one, the angry one, temperamental and irrational when he didn’t get his way? He’s supposed to help Thomas, not inconvenience him with tantrums. 

“Let me show you something,” Patton says after a beat of silence, his voice so soft Logan nearly misses it. The logical side swallows, nods, and Patton takes his hand, pulling him off the bed and to the center of his room. Patton sits and lays down, blinking expectantly at Logan to do the same. 

When they’re both situated on the carpet, Patton takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. 

Logan watches him, face painted with anticipation, but nothing happens- until Patton’s eyes flutter open again, and he points to the ceiling. Logan looks back, and his heart nearly stops.

The dark blue of his ceiling has morphed into shades of purple and blue and black, all melting into each other like the mouth of a river meeting the ocean; across their merging shades are bright, twinkling dots that seem to dance in place, numerous and breathtaking. 

Logan stares open-mouthed at the night sky draped above them, eyes tracing the invisible lines between stars to make the constellations he knows like friends.

“Whenever I’m upset,” Patton starts quietly, “I lay down and look at the stars, to remind myself of everything outside of me and my problems. The universe is infinite.” He looks over at Logan, a smile tugging at his lips, and Logan can’t help but see the stars reflected in his eyes. “My problems are infinitesimal.”

And Logan laughs. 

The noise bubbles up from his chest, piercing the buzzing air of his room in an instant, and a trickle of recognition he knows quite well strengthens as he relishes the infinity of stars and recklessness of laughter and sheer, joyful comedy of laying on the carpet, staring at the ceiling and making jokes about stupid mistakes as if they’re nothing more than a wisp of foolishness in his memory. It’s a trickle he’s felt coursing through his thoughts when he watches the rain, when he studies the sky, when he learns something new and spends days digging into it, when he feels the importance of the universe closer than he feels much else and loves it with every inch of his existence, vast and confusing and daunting as it is. This trickle has never been a trickle at all, but a rushing river, always waiting for its time to shine in his mind once more. 

_ Agape _ . Universal, unselfish love. A galaxy in his chest, with stars that reach to his fingertips and nebulae to his head. 

“You are infinite,” Patton’s voice comes a moment later, singing with sincerity and fondness that makes Logan’s heart soar all over again. “You’re never going to be perfect, Logan, but every part of you will change no matter what - if you want that change to be good, all you have to do is steer it, and that’s what you’re doing. You deserve to have hope and faith in yourself. You deserve to be proud when you succeed.” 

Logan’s eyes stay trained on the ceiling as tears prick at their corners, spilling over the edges and down to the carpet. He makes no move to swipe them away; there’s no frustration in this moment, no shame, no guilt to move him so- there’s only a burst of warmth in his head, like thousands of flowers blooming at once behind his eyes. The trickle they accompany is one he’s not quite used to, but he knows its name, and repeats it like a mantra, a victory cry:  _ philautia _ , self-love, investment and forgiveness and acceptance of himself. 

And he thinks, as he and Patton lay there under a painted night sky that sparkles with life, that perhaps agape and philautia are meant to be together. Perhaps they’re the love of two different universes colliding, from the Milky Way to the galaxies imprinted in DNA, the endlessness of life dancing in tandem with infinite ways to simply  _ be _ . 

Perhaps, if he can hold on to one, the other is sure to follow. 

 

The sixth time he feels a trickle in his head surge forward, it’s not a surge at all.

 

There is no single time he can identify the strengthening of the stream. It comes in bits, small currents that push him forward with the gentleness of a summer breeze, and it’s not until it’s full force that he sees its progress, picks apart all the tiny pieces that have formed to finish the puzzle. 

Logan’s not sure he can feel Eros. He remembers the term while flipping fondly though his vocab cards one day - sensual love, corporeal in nature; he sits and thinks hard about it, but he feels nothing of the sort. It doesn’t really bother him. He knows of people who never experience the attraction, so he sees no reason to dwell on it, and the word settles back in his head as an accepted shortcoming in his discoveries. 

He pays no mind to it as he thinks back to the moments that have led to where he is now. 

He thinks of Patton tugging him into the kitchen to make cookies. He thinks of the rainfall, painted with hot chocolate and reminiscence. He thinks of the night sky and soft reassurances and endless concern and infinity in itself. 

He thinks of the way Patton smiles with his whole body, bright and engaged and overflowing with warmth, the way his eyes magnify everything he feels, the way he’s unafraid to just exist, free of concern over destiny and the need to prove himself as worthy of the stardust he’s made up of. How he holds cups with two hands no matter what, as if every drink is a gift he treasures, how his eyes crinkle at the edges and his nose scrunches up when he’s happy, how he listens to music in silence the first time he hears it, lets it float into the air unadulterated and sit in his mind before he joins in the melodies, how he’s a collection of quirks and phenomenons that Logan can hardly comprehend in the magnitude they deserve, but he tries nonetheless to wrap his head around it all. 

And it’s not until his hands are in Patton’s, fingers laced together and voices overlapping like instrumentals coming together to form a song, that he feels the stream in his head for what it is. He feels the absence of butterflies and nervousness, feels that it’s all comfort now, a soft familiarity built from fondness and confused, clumsy love; and he knows it’s love, unafraid in its identity and secure in its place in his existence. 

He doesn’t need to hear the word in his head to understand it. 

_ Pragma.  _ Enduring love. Mutual and stable, built on foundations of compromise and growth and support. 

It’s not a trickle, not a tsunami, not a rushing river or stream of tears - it’s a brook, constant and gentle and always babbling behind his thoughts. It’s a comfort and a motivator. It’s Patton’s smile and the sound of his laughter and the morning sun lighting a halo in his hair, and it’s Logan, his growth and efforts to be better. 

It’s them together, two parts coming together as one. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> yall ever write 4000 words on impulse


End file.
